This article was written by Ken Leaver who comes from a product & commercial background. He has founded multiple companies and held senior product positions at SEA tech companies like Lazada and Pomelo Fashion.
Ken runs his own agency that helps early stage companies execute faster and cheaper. Check out his linkedin at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kenleaver/
Guest Author: Ken Leaver
Lots of managers talk about how they are focused on results and care less about how much time you spend, etc.
The problem comes when members of their team do not bring results. Then often they immediately jump to conclusions like… the person is not focused enough or they do not work enough hours.
Such conclusions are often based on very few data points. Just some general perceptions that they have.
And when they force the person to work more hours or get more focused, it almost never helps. Why?
Because they have almost no visibility on the micro-decisions and activities that led to the bad result. Rather for them that part is like a black box.
And since they don’t understand what is in the black box the only conclusions they can make are these very general ones that are typically wrong.
Today I’m going to explain further what I mean.
The ‘Black Box’
By the ‘Black Box’ I mean when a manager does not have transparency on the decisions that a team member took each day. And therefore they cannot input on them in a timely way.
They also do not have visibility on what progress was made on each prioritized topic each day. Nor do they see if the person worked on any non-prioritised topics.
Rather the manager relies on two interactions typically:
- Some type of regular catch-up like a weekly one-on-one
- A direct message from the person (eg. via Slack) when there is an issue that the person wants help on (which tends to happen sporadically).
Therefore everything else that happens outside of these two interactions is what I call the ‘Black Box’. And in my experience, this is where most of the work was actually done.
90%+ of managers I have seen operate via this ‘Black Box’
Almost all managers operate with this ‘Black Box’ approach. They have one-on-ones at some regular interval and outside of those they don’t really hear much from their team members. Except when problems occur.
And note that this is normal.
This is how most managers were taught to do the job.
This is how some of the ‘best managers’ out there operate. You know… the guys that write all the books on how to manage.
So how could they possibly be wrong?
And how could this guy Ken, who obviously is not nearly as well known as them, possibly be right?
Well, my answer to that would be try it and then tell me I’m wrong. What I’ve consistently found is when people use these systems themselves correctly, they become almost instant converts.
I don’t need to convince them this stuff is better. They convince themselves and then start telling me just how much more shit they are getting done.
How do you open the ‘Black Box’?
So how do my systems open this ‘Black Box’?
Well think about it.
Literally, everything is a task. And all work is reflected as an update to a task (as comments).
So you know in the comment history of a card every time a person worked on the card and what they did.
You know why they got stuck. And responded almost real-time trying to unblock them.
So if they end up failing at something I have a very strong understanding of why they did. And I do not need to make vague recommendations.
Rather I can make very specific ones, which I’m doing almost real-time each day.
So how do they ‘fail’ in my system? Well, there are really only two ways:
1- They don’t follow my system (in which case they are off the team) 2- They are not capable of doing the job
That is all! And that makes it pretty hard to fail actually.
Compare this to the ‘traditional’ system where I often find that the number one reason people fail is because of poor alignment with their manager.
For example, they misunderstood what their manager wanted and then went off in the wrong direction, which ends up frustrating the manager. Then the relationship gets damaged and it’s all downhill from there.
This happens all the time!
So the reality is… to consistently get the right outputs, you need to manage the inputs!
Pretty much all of the managers I’ve seen in my career who said that all they cared about was the outputs did not scale well.
Why? Because managing in that way relies on getting very high quality people consistently and forming a trustful relationship with them.
But guess what? Getting high quality people takes a lot of time and money. And forming a trusting relationship with people also takes a lot of time.
The reality these days for most managers is that they do not have these comforts.
They need their teams to deliver high quality work immediately.
If they hired a person that is not optimal for the role… most managers just need to suck it up and deal with it. Because they don’t have time to change the person.
And so to deliver consistently with these limitations, you absolutely NEED TO BE MANAGING THE INPUTS.
I’ve seen this proven to be the case so many times that I consider it a law rather than my opinion.
And if you use a system like the one I propose… your ability to ‘manage the inputs’ will improve exponentially. Making it a no brainer in my humble opinion.
These are the systems we use with our freelance teams at www.taskbeasts.com.
Where the vision is that you can outsource pretty much anything in a cost efficient and flexible way using a single, streamlined process. We call this the ‘Beast Method’.
If you’re interested in scaling your company in a way that is far more flexible and cost efficient than the traditional route of hiring employees… DM me to find out more.
